the verizon card was near cable internet speed and the cingular card was running at about 3k (took a couple times to even load the test page). i work in cincinnati, oh which is a medium to large size city.

It sounds like you had a bad EDGE card, or an old card with only GPRS. You should have seen around 120Kbps (15 kilobytes/sec) if you had an EDGE-capable card in a EDGE service area. That's about 4-5x slower than I usually can get with Sprint EVDO, but I'm more likely to get 1X than EVDO when travelling. And that is usually slower than EDGE.

I bet if you went a half hour out of town, that you would lose that VZ speed advantage.